The ride from Quebec to Montreal was relatively short. We left Hilton, Quebec on Saturday morning at around 11am and got to Garden Inn in Montreal at around 2pm.

We stayed in this particular hotel in Montreal last spring during our Canadian trip with the children. I remembered the great salt water pool, which I definitely wanted to use. I forgot about their fancy made to order breakfast with daily crepe selection, which is quite unique, so it was a pleasant surprise to rediscover it the next morning.

Danya researched TripAdvisor for dinner options, and we’ve decided to try Brasserie 701, which was less than a mile walk from the hotel. The GPS brought us right to the Notre-Dame de Montréal, but we could not find the restaurant at first and made a few circles around the block. Brasserie 701 ended up being in the same square as the Cathedral, so we had a nice view during our dinner.

I was excited to see a risotto on the menu, but after we got seated the waiter told us that since it was only 4pm, the dinner menu was not yet available. Danya’s steak was on the lunch menu, but my risotto was not, so I was really disappointed and considered leaving. The waiter went to the kitchen to see if they can make an exception for us, and to my delight, they did. We spend a while trying to figure out the wine menu, and ended up ordering beers instead.

Both of us got Kronenbourg 1664 brand, but Daniеl ordered a wheat blanc variety, and I got the regular one. Both beers were really good, but if I were to order again, I’d go with the blanc as well. It turns out that we’ve already tried this beer in Irish bar in Keflavic. Danya says that it’s one of his favorites now, so when he went to stock up on beer before Christmas, he bought it along with some sour blueberry and Erdinger beers. The food was also really delicious.

After we finished dinner, it was already dark and still cold in the city. We walked around the Notre-Dame a little more and then went back to the hotel. The pool was waiting! I felt a little bit sad that the children were not there to enjoy it with us, but at the same time I could fully relax without having to worry about them being safe and happy.

We chatted with a French-Canadian couple in the hot tube, which was really nice. The woman told me that my accent was more New Yorkian than Russian, which was somehow pleasant to hear. I know that I have a hard-to-place accent, which is different from Daniеl’s. Still don’t know if my speaking Belorussian is the reason for that.

We had a light dinner at the hotel’s restaurant — buffalo mozzarella, poutine and Belgian Moon, which is what they call Blue Moon in Canada.

Now on the subject of poutine. Apparently, it’s a Quebec specialty, but I only found out about it in Montreal while watching Antony Bourdain’s guide to French Canadian cuisine. Poutine is pretty much french fries with brown gravy and cheese curds. When we dined in Quebec, the waitress offered us to upgrade our french fries, but we politely declined. What a pity! The hotel’s poutine was pretty good, but our waitress hinted that it was far from the best. Note to self — next time we’re in French Canada, we should try this in other places.

Next day we walked back to Notre-Dame. There is an entrance fee, so we did not go inside the night before, but decided to do it during day time. Next to the entrance we’ve noticed a poster advertising a live organ concert at 2pm. The tickets were relatively inexpensive, and the whole idea was so enticing. Ever since we’ve heard the organist in Washington National Cathedral I dreamed of hearing the great instrument in its natural environment again. Danya was not as excited as me at the prospect, but he did not mind going either, since he was also really impressed in Washington.

It was still about two hours before the concert, so we went for a walk with plans to return. First we visited the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel, also known as the Sailor’s Church. On the top it has a statue of the Virgin as Star of the Sea, and inside it has models of ships hanging from the ceiling. Very unusual, very distinct place. I am glad that we stopped by.

Then we walked to the river shore, took some pictures of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, saw an empty ferris wheel and a whole bunch of closed kiosks, which in season sell different food items, accessories and souvenirs. It was chilly and windy, but we were dressed for the weather. There was quite a number of people running and fast walking on the promenade. I guess, they are used to this weather and it does not deter them from excersizing.

We came back to the cathedral with a small cushion of time before the concert. There was an option to pay extra to sit on top near the organ, and we’ve decided to do it. The administration only accepted cash, but we had no CAD. Luckily, they’ve accepted USD. Of course, they didn’t account for the exchange rate, so we ended up paying a little extra for the convenience of using another country’s money, but at least we had that option.

The concert turned out to be a big disappointment. I never thought this possible, but the organ did sound bad. At first, I thought that we made a huge mistake of paying extra and getting to the top and sitting next to the organ player. I kept wondering if the acoustics were better at the bottom, and they probably were, but when we changed seats closer to the end of the concert and went down, I did not hear a significant difference.

The organist was very VERY mediocre. I understand, that playing organ is not easy, but it was the Notre-Dame and not some small village church after all. Danya did not even recognize half the melodies, and he commented that the playing was sloppy and inconsistent.

And the repertoire was something horrible too. The first and the last songs, which were Zarathustra by Strauss and Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach respectively, were great, but majority of the rest was “contemporary music”, which included “Beauty and the Beast” song, “Somewhere over the rainbow”, “New York, New York” and the likes. Call me old fashioned, but I was looking forward to classics, and got bored with organist’s choices.

All this being said, I am still glad that we went. It was a unique experience, and at times I even enjoyed it. More than anything, I realized that even in the acoustics of the church and with the music by greatest composers, the organ sounds only as good as the person who plays it.

Our next stop was the Creperie-Fondue place that we visited last time with kids. Since Danya’s stomach is sometimes sensitive to cheeses, we’ve decided to try beef bullion fondue this time around. First time for both of us. We ordered a ratatouille crepe to share as last time as well. The fondue was great!

The best part about it was actually not the meat or the vegetables, but the broth. Danya said that we should not waste it and that it will go down superbly on such a cold day. I asked for two cups, and got them along with a ladle. Apparently we were not the first people who wanted to drink up the bullion, although the waiter said that not that many people did this. The broth was so rich, filling and spicy. Heaven! I tried to replicate it at home, but fell short. Not sure if I need marrow bones or some special spices for that… Maybe, I’ll crack this one day.

We went to the hotel and up to the pool again. Spent almost two hours there. So relaxing again. We ate dinner at the hotel’s restaurant again, but ordered sangria’s instead of beer this time. They were pretty decent.

Next day was the long drive home. Good thing that we planned a vacation the way we did, because driving from Quebec would have been even more tiring.

There were not a lot of cars at the border, but the patrol officer really took his time with both cars in front of us (inspecting the cars and talking to the people for 10+ minutes). We went through in probably under a minute. I guess, we look trustworthy.

On our way we stopped in Albany. We’ve been there a few times before, but never got a chance to go inside the capitol. I was surprised to discover a big underground mall that leads from parking to the capitol building. We’ve gotten the stamp for Danya’s NP passport and took a self-guided tour inside.

The NY capitol is big, impressive and you can see that the state has a lot of money. The staircase alone is something! I particularly liked a hall of governors, with portraits of all the governor’s of New York. Well, almost all. Spitzer’s portrait was so obviously and shamefully (for him) missing.

Originally we planned to eat in Albany, but after walking to the restaurant, we changed our minds and decided to eat fast food somewhere along the way to save time. I think it was a right decision, since we got home at around 7 o’clock. There was a little bit of traffic closer to the city, but it was expected. The whole trip came up close to 1,200 miles, which is a lot of driving for a short getaway. It was still very nice and memorable.

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This year we had a little bit less time for our anniversary trip than we usually do, so instead of flying somewhere we decided to take a road trip on our own car. We initially thought of going to Montreal, but since we were going without kids we figured we could go a little bit further and add Quebec City to our itinerary.

Plus we’ve been to Montreal only a year and half before and our last and only trip to Quebec City was way back in 2008. At first we were concerned that it’s going to be extremely cold there at the very end of November, but after looking at the map of Europe we saw that we’ve spent our vacations much further north than Quebec and it was fine. That turned out to be not a correct assumption.

Another thing of significance of this vacation was the fact that this was the first time that our actual anniversary date fell right on Thanksgiving — just like our actual wedding was. It took 11 years for this cycle to complete. And so our total vacation was 6 days long including the days that we would spend on driving there and back.

Originally we planned to leave on the morning of November 22nd — Wednesday before Thanksgiving. On Tuesday I want to work and learned that we were going to have half a day on Wednesday. It suddenly occurred to me that probably a lot of companies would do the same. I decided to leave a little early from work and asked Alёna to finish packing our bags as soon as possible. I also talked to my mom and she agreed to take the kids a night ahead of schedule.

It took me 3(!!!) hours to get home from work. It was maddening. Probably the longest commute I’ve ever had. Even though I was extremely tired I still wanted to leave that night to avoid the same terrible drive the next morning. We ended up leaving at around 10pm and it took us under an hour to pass by my office again. All the traffic was gone by then.

We decided to start our trip with Quebec City since it was further away than Montreal to make the drive home easier. It was a good decision considering that we managed to leave earlier. Our route ran through Vermont — we wanted to make a stop at Montpelier since we really haven’t seen the capitol during the day time. So we drove for about 4 hours the first night. When we started to get tired we found the closest Hilton chain hotel and were in bed before 2am.

We ended up stopping somewhere in Massachusetts, not far from Vermont border. We drove for about 200 miles out of our total 570 miles and about 140 miles away from Montpelier. The hotel that we picked was Hampton Inn & Suites Greenfield and it ran us around $130 for the night. Nice, clean and pleasant place to spend the night. It was a good decision to leave when we did — we haven’t spend any time in traffic during our overall drive to Quebec at all.

In the morning we set out to finish our journey to Quebec City with a short detour to visit the capital and capitol of Vermont in Montpelier. The capitol turned out to be completely different from what I remembered it to be. I guess I was confusing it with a clock-tower on the main street because last time we drove through this town in the middle of the night. Capitol was completely dark and main street actually had some lights on.

We walked around inside, looked at some painting, including an official Vermont State House portrait of Howard Dean. And we added another official state capital stamp to our collection — one of the two new ones this trip — another one was for New York at the end of our trip.

Then we ate a small lunch at a restaurant right across from the capitol building and went on to finish our drive to Quebec — about 240 more miles. We got to Montpelier at around 1pm and we left it closer to 3pm. We crossed the US-Canadian border at around 4:30pm and we were in our hotel room at almost 8pm.

LONG drive. I have to say that if before drives like these were fairly easy for me to do it is no longer so. Since Arosha was born our all our trips were cut up in smaller pieces in order not to drive long distances in a single sitting. So I’m no longer used to those.

Hilton turned out to be as nice as expected. They upgraded our room to a suite on one of the top floors with a grand view of parliament building from our windows. We also discovered a bottle of champagne on ice in our room and congratulatory note on our wedding anniversary. What a pleasure.

The hotel was located only half a mile away from the downtown in the heart of the city. But by the time we got to the hotel we were so tired that we just went downstairs to a hotel restaurant for our dinner. As it sometimes happens with hotel restaurants it ended up being very very mediocre. We ordered several dishes and they were all just off. We haven’t returned to this place again and ate elsewhere. And then we went to sleep to recharge for the next day.

The next day was our anniversary day and Thanksgiving at the same time. We didn’t make any plans ahead of time for our special dinner, so we made a little bit of research, read some guides and checked out some videos by Anthony Bourdain about French Canada. And then we set out to Old Quebec — a short walk as I mentioned above.

The day was very very cold. We had our late November vacations in much more northern cities of Europe, but I guess Gulf Stream makes a huge difference. All those cities were fairly warm and Quebec City most definitely was not. So one of the first stops we made when we arrived to Old Quebec was at Dale of Norway store and acquiring a new much warmer hat for me. Dale of Norway brought up some recent memories — those stores were all over Norway which we visited only a couple month before.

The we walked along the promenade in front of Château Frontenac — a hotel that was built at the end of 19th century and looks a lot like a huge beautiful castle. Wikipedia says that the hotel is generally recognized as the most photographed hotel in the world.

We made a short walk from there to a nearby Notre Dame de Quebec. I don’t think we’ve been inside before as it did look unfamiliar. It looked quite beautiful inside because of a huge golden structure or sculpture at the head of the cathedral. We noticed a Christmas market being constructed nearby — such a familiar sight from pretty much all of our European vacations. And then a walk back to promenade.

My memories of Quebec were kind of fuzzy and I actually only remembered two things — one was Château Frontenac and another one was a street of shops and restaurants under some large hill. So as expected it was in the same part of the city, right under the mentioned above promenade. The street is called Rue du Petit Champlain. I also remember that my parents bought Alёna a pair of artsy necklaces as gift for her graduation from college I think.

I thought it would be nice to do the same thing — this being our anniversary and her birthday being only a week ago. So after looking in couple of places we found a nice handmade pendant and a matching pair of earrings. Nice mementos of our trip. We also spotted a nice restaurant with some rabbit stews, but we already had different plans for today.

For our anniversary dinner we picked a place called Aux Anciens Canadiens — the name that popped up in a lot of places during our “research” in the morning. It had nice ratings at TripAdvisor and came with a lot of recommendations. Time-wise, this dinner, just as all our other dinners of this trip, fell somewhere closer to lunch than dinner. But we often happen to do this when we travel.

I started with a great lobster bisque soup that felt just right on this cold day and then I had a really really nice wild meat pie with a delicious sauce. Alёna had a split pea soup and then some cheesy-melty dish with a bunch of vegetables. And instead of pairing our meals with wine we went with a pair of glasses of draft beer. It was a nice place and a good dinner.

Afterwards we walked back to our hotel for some rest — we were already tired and didn’t really want to do anything for today. Later on we walked over to the executive lounge at our hotel for some light snacks, deserts and drinks. Another huge bonus of us staying at Hilton as Diamond VIPs. And that was the end of our 11th anniversary.

The next day we woke up to a white Quebec. It started snowing during the night and the snow was still falling. Even though the snowstorm seemed heavy not much of the snow have accumulated on the streets — but all the rooftops were dressed in white.

We didn’t really know what to do for the day, so we walked down and asked for some advice at a concierge desk. We got a recommendation to see the country side and visit a waterfall on the outskirts of the city. Why not, we thought. We drove out to Montmorency Falls and a large park that surrounded it. Took us no more than 30 minutes.

We started at the foot of the falls, but everything seemed to be closed. Then we noticed a bridge running over the top with people on it. So we drove around and found the park with a bunch of what turned out to be nice trails. The views from the top were great. It was still snowing and it was making everything special. In fact the whole day was somewhat magical — like a nice fairytale. This piece of nature and the city itself.

The only somewhat unpleasant thing that happened was my icy slip and fall. The ground was very icy and in most places covered by light snow, so it was not always obvious. Eventually I slipped and fell down right in sync with some other woman several meters away. Probably looked funny from the side, would’ve made a nice video. I got up and didn’t really hurt anything.

And then we happened upon an icy hill. I crouched down and took a nice speedy ride down. Only the ice quickly turned to ground towards the end which brought me to a quick stop and sent me flying with a nice flip. And again I didn’t hurt anything. Alёna wanted to try too, but she decided to just sit down and slide down. That worked a lot better than my feat.

She liked it so much that she decided to do it again. By then a couple of young people came by and saw her doing this. So one of the guys tells his girlfriend that they should do this. And the girls goes — no, that’s crazy! And the guy goes — they just did it! And she goes — oh, OK then, let’s do this.

So the guy sat down, she sat in his lap and they rode down. Then they stop and she picks something up from the snow — wow, somebody lost their keys! I check my pocket and holy crap! My keys! So glad that we decided to stay and watch them take a ride. That could’ve been very unpleasant and would probably ruin the day.

After that we drove around a little bit — noticed that a lot of houses had tents around their driveways, so they wouldn’t have to undig their cars — never saw this kind of setup in New York. Seemed to make a lot of sense. And then we drove back to our hotel and walked over to the old city again.

As it usually happens the market has opened. This happened many times to us. We see a market under construction and then while we are still around, it opens. Right at the center of it there was an open air kitchen grilling German sausages. What a smell. But we wanted to have a proper dinner, so we resisted. We bought a couple of little toys for our kids, albeit at a nearby store, not the market and now we were ready for dinner.

We decided to go back to Rue du Petit Champlain and eat at a place that had rabbit stews. TripAdvisor had high ratings for that place, but I guess it was popular on its own — the wait time was over an hour. Nope, that doesn’t work. So we turned back to TripAdvisor and found another well rated place nearby — Bistro Sous le Fort.

I had some deer sausage and some duck with french fries I think. When we were ordering the fries they said that they could put some gravy on top and some cheese curds. That sounded weird to us, so we declined. And only later we found out that what they were actually offering is called poutine and is actually a french Canada specialty. Doh! We actually only realized this when we were at Montreal as you will see in the next post.

And in fact this is it for Quebec City. We went back to our hotel, visited executive lounge again and off to Montreal we went the next morning. A great first part of our trip.

P.S. All the pictures for this trip have been taken with iPhone X. While it’s not D700 quality and I was slightly worried about the possibility of ruined vacation pictures my back has been really thankful. They are most definitely Web worthy.